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John Pflueger, technology strategist for data center infrastructure at Dell, is a member of the Green Grid’s board of directors and a technical committee chair for the IT industry consortium.
In an effort to create more incentives for data center operators to increase their facilities’ energy efficiency, the Green Grid is working on a new metric, aiming to put a number on the amount of energy that gets recycled.
Development of the metric, whose current tentative title is Energy Reuse Factor, is at its early stages and the team is placing a lot of focus on quantifying the amount of waste heat generated by IT equipment that is being reused for office-space heating.
“As we’ve gotten the ability to measure what’s going on in the data center, as the metrics for understanding what’s going on with respect to infrastructure have become better adopted and better understood – specifically PUE – people have started to want to get credit for doing certain things,” said John Pflueger, member of the Grid’s board of directors and a technical committee chair for the organization. Pflueger is also technology strategist for data center infrastructure at Dell.
“If you’re in a cold climate and you have all this nice warm exhaust air, wouldn’t it make sense to use some of that exhaust air to heat another part of a building (and) displace other energy usage?”
The Green Grid received some reports where certain companies began trying to fold their reuse of waste heat into their PUE figures. “And they were getting PUE numbers less than 'one,' which really shouldn’t have been possible. Kind of defeats the purpose of the metric.”
Instead of fighting the tendency by such organizations to distort PUE by factoring in energy reuse, the organization decided to develop a metric that will measure just that to provide companies with a way to get credit for their energy recycling efforts.
While PUE focuses on measuring efficiency within the data center’s boundaries, the ERF would allow for energy reuse efforts whose benefits are felt outside of those boundaries to be quantified and recognized as contributors to energy efficiency of the data center, according to Michael Patterson, technology and strategy workgroup chair for the Green Grid and senior power and thermal architect at Intel.
Along with the Green Grid, the National Renewable Energy Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are intimately involved with development of the new metric.
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Keywords: Green Grid, PUE, Energy Reuse Factor, data center waste heat, energy recycling, energy reuse in data centers, ERF | | 
